Whatever housecleaning already may be underway in the executive offices upstairs at Chargers Park, there were signs that it definitely had begun downstairs in the locker room.

Coming out of their first meetings of the week for the first game this season that didn’t mean squat as far as their own standing in the AFC West or contention for the postseason, a few players here and there got a head start on next Monday. Clearing out their locker stalls, they headed off to the parking lot with large plastic bags of stuff accumulated since Day One of training camp in July.

Though not one of the aforementioned, safety Eric Weddle said, “Obviously, our season’s over.”

Yet … but no. Not according to the schedule. But you knew what he meant.

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As hard as it is to win games that count — especially as many games as it takes to make the playoffs and The Game that everybody’s trying to get into – one of the hardest things for an NFL player to do is play a game that means absolutely nothing in the big picture.

Harder yet is convincing people that once you’ve been eliminated from contention and relegated to playing out the season, there’s really no such thing as a meaningless game. Particularly when you're one loss away from the franchise's first losing record since 2002.

“We don’t get paid to come in and mope around and lay down and b.s. through the last game,” said guard Tyronne Green. “You’ve got to go out and try and give yourself some edge on next season. Going out on a loss makes it a long offseason. Better to go out with a win.”

Which brings the Chargers back to Oakland, of all places, for the 2011 finale. The way things have worked out, then, perhaps the Chargers are fortunate that this particular game fell at the end of this particular season. They’ve been eliminated, but they in turn can deny Oakland its first AFC West title and/or postseason appearance since 2002.

“Oh yeah,” said Weddle. “I don’t want the Raiders to go. I don’t want Denver to go. I want us to go. We have control over one more game. We’ll try our hardest to spoil their seasons.”

When last year ended so prematurely, the Chargers didn’t even have that much incentive for their last close-out game. Both they and the Broncos knew there would be no playoffs for either when the Chargers went to Denver and came up with one of their better performances, a 33-28 victory that left San Diego with at least a winning record to show for its struggles.

“We actually went in pretty fired up,” said fullback Jacob Hester. “We had a great pregame talk from a couple guys in the locker room. Shoot, I don’t even remember who it was talking, but I remember it being loud and I remember it being crazy in there.